One of the hero pᴀssengers who helped subdue the alleged hijacker co-pilot on Wednesday’s flydubai flight managed to stop the plane’s nosedive by mimicking moves he saw on a popular TV show.
Yaniv Hayoun, an Israeli plumber, caught the first officer in a headlock, and said he felt the aircraft still going down as he and other pᴀssengers pulled the man out of the cockpit.
“Someone screamed that there had been a stabbing, and then the plane started losing altitude and control, leaning from one side to another,” Hayoun, who was sitting right behind business class, told The Free Press.
The attack happened around two-and-a-half hours after taking off from Dubai, as the Tel Aviv-bound flight was cruising at about 34,000 feet. It plummeted some 18,000 feet in two minutes, according to Israeli media.
Hayoun said the aircraft plunged “into a steep dive” and pᴀssengers “went flying” as he tried approaching the cockpit.
“I jumped back in there, grabbed the controls, started pulling the controls,” he said, adding that he had some understanding of flight controls thanks to the Canadian disaster documentary series, “Mayday.”
Mayday, known as Air Crash Investigations outside the US, covers real world air disasters and probes what went wrong on the flights.
At the very least, Hayoun said, he knew he had to pull the steering levers up to stop the plane from descending any further.
“The plane started leveling out a little more, and then the pilot told me he was taking over from there,” Hayoun added.
Hayoun, according to President Donald Trump, is a plumber who has rarely flown in airplanes before Wednesday’s horrifying alleged hijacking.
“An Israeli plumber, never flew a plane, was rarely in planes, very rarely flew,” Trump told reporters from the Oval Office Wednesday.
“And he saw what was going on and he heard the screaming…he ripped this guy out of the seat, threw him back, the crowd got him, the pᴀssengers got him.”
Two off-duty pilots were aboard the plane and helped control the plane — and land it safely in Saudi Arabia.
Hayoun was among the pᴀssengers who hopped on a quick rescue flight back to Israel, where he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — while still covered in blood.
Hayoun could be seen doing a distance hug with Netanyahu to avoid staining the premier’s shirt as the pᴀssenger was still wearing the bloodstained T-shirt after stopping the co-pilot’s alleged terror plot.
“When I went in, I saw the terrorist on the control,” Hayoun told Netanyahu. “I grabbed the terrorist, put him in a hold, and pulled him outside.”
The suspect, who has yet to be named, used a knife to attack flight captain Smit Machchhar, who was able to alert the cabin of the attack and open the cockpit door so help could arrive.
Hayoun described the horrifying ordeal as “complete chaos.”
“One of the pilots stabbed another pilot. He tried to crash us. When it leveled out a little, just a little, we managed to get back up,” he told The Free Press.
The co-pilot was allegedly attacking the plane’s control panel when Hayoun and the other pᴀssengers rushed in to stop him.
“I managed to open the cockpit door with the help of another crewmember. We physically fought with the co-pilot, he was going wild,” he said of the unidentified pilot.
“I put him in a chokehold, took control of him, and dragged him out of the cockpit,” Hayoun added.
His wife, Meital, explained, “They tied up the attacker using headphones at first,” and later “found zip ties and restrained him with those.”
Hayoun said he and “three other Israelis” guarded the first officer attacker while pᴀssengers administered first aid to the pilot who was “stabbed multiple times.”
“We kept him alive the entire way,” Hayoun said.
Machchhar’s current condition remains unknown.
“It’s a miracle that we’re alive,” Meital said. “We’re incredibly emotional to finally be back in Israel.”
Netanyahu hailed Sharir and his fellow pᴀssengers as heroes who “saved many lives and displayed great bravery.”
“They prevented a serious tragedy,” he said.
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
